I haven't been involved with foksy work for a long time, but I'm working behind the scenes on it again now.

I am currently slowly building a version for Tiny Core linux; have uploaded espeak to their repos, have a TC extension of yasr under testing, and today managed to compile speech-dispatcher for that system as well.

However, I'm not forgetting Puppy. I now have Puppy 4.2.1 with devx as well and have checked that speech-dispatcher compiles okay on it (which it does). I imagine the fokSyf Eye R version I produced (with patch) for Puppy Dingo (4.00) might work with Puppy 4.2.1 but I'm planning to produce a new version with updated programs and I'll try out some of the commandline apps Trobin used with his Speech Pup too and consider creating dotpets of some of these apps for incorporation into foksy.

I'm planning to change the fosky format though; separate dotpets rather than one big dotpet. I may also create an sfs version of it, since that should be quite trivial to arrange. Will be a few weeks till I do all this though; I'm busy with home matters right now - I will soon upload yasr and speech-dispatcher for TC and develop the Puppy version of foksy at the same time I do the one for TC - so more choice for the visually impaired and anyone else who wants speech accessibility (with or without X apps).

Note that TC now has a microcore option, which doesn't load X if you don't want it. Booting to the commandline in Puppy, on the other hand, tends to require boot script hacks/changes, which makes it more difficult to bolt such accessibility options onto official puppy's (Trobin, for example, needed to make a remaster, Speech Pup, in order to allow booting straight to the commandline). The recent official puppy has also increased the use of embedded bling.

Woof system seems promising. Perhaps there will be a non-X option? Apparently "bling" will be an option only with woof, which is great since a lot of bling and desktop clutter generally tends to be discriminatory and difficult for screen readers to handle, IMO, unless it is particularly designed to increase accessibility. I believe that Robert Shingledecker suffers from poor vision, which might be one reason why TC lends itself to this sort of application so readily.

If you are setting up Puppy 4.3.1 for anyone who is visually impaired or anyone who would generally like to use a screen reader with speech output, you might find foksyfeyer useful. Though created quite a long while ago, it nevertheless works fine in Puppy 4.3.1 and includes a yasr/speechdispatcher/espeak screen reading environment and a menu driven system which provides easy keyboard access to its included inbuilt console (commandline text) applications.

The console (commandline) apps provided in the dotpet include: "nice" a great wee text editor, which works in traditional fashion including [the familiar use of ctrl-c, ctrl-x and ctrl-v] and provides a human friendly menu bar; edbrowse (another editor and also a text mode web-browser with ssl and simple javascript support, which is very powerful but a bit tricky to learn; Lynx webbrowser (with ssl and simple javascript support); sc, a spreadsheet program; krecspeak voice recorder (to ogg and mp3) and player (uses sox for functionality); and a simple inbuilt rxvt console (fonts) magnifier. The whole system has been fine-tuned and configured so everything works well together.

Installing foksy involves a few simple steps:

1. Download the following two dotpets from www.puppylinux.asia/ (login: puppy; password: linux):

EDIT: No longer at puppylinux.asia. Instead you can find the files at [url]arkitektia.com[/url] under section Products -> Software Designs

2. Actually installing the above two dotpets is enough to get foksyfeyer running with almost complete functionality. However, if you want krecspk (the voice recorder) to function, you need to install the following dotpet version of sox (other versions of sox often didn't include mp3 support, but this one does):

3. The above command automatically creates (without further user interaction), amongst other things, an entry in the file /etc/profile.local, so you need to then reboot your system to complete the install. i.e. Reboot once you've finished doing that, and finished reading all these instructions! :-)

For more information, choose Help from the menu, or read the documentation files automatically installed in
/usr/local/share/doc/sreadenv

Disclaimer: like all installations I suppose, install foksyfeyer at your own risk of course!

Obviously, your underlying sound system must have been previously t ested as working (e.g. Alsamixer set up to allow play and record at sufficient volume - for recording it is usually good to set record volume to maximum and to boost it as in this thread post:

EDIT: Oh... I forgot to mention that foksyfeyer comes with a GUI version of the voice recorder called wrecspk. After installation of the above dotpets you should find wrecspk as a JWM Menu item in the Category Multimedia. It is a gtkdialog frontend to krecspk.

You might find the following hot-key commands useful with foksy:

Alt-x to temporarily stop the speech
Alt-w to re-read the whole visible console screen
Alt-q if you are in the "nice" editor and want to quit out of it.
Moving the cursor down to a line usually causes that line to then be read.
Read the menu provided help info on yasr for more speech control key information._________________github mcewanwLast edited by mcewanw on Tue 15 Oct 2013, 01:10; edited 2 times in total

If you just want something lite, I made a pet that will speak the text in your clipboard (using a hot key) or whatever text you pass to it - using a web based tool... GUI in the planning stages

Well there is light and there is light! :-) Foksyfeyer doesn't need to be online and run seamonkey to read text from the clipboard and it does a lot more than that... And the only "heavy" part of foksy is the 3.5 MB download and storage space on disk for it; being commandline apps the memory and general resource usage is generally tiny (even espeak doesn't consume a lot of resources on my Pent III 450MHz 256MB RAM laptop)..

However, I do like your popup (Alt-l) idea for a simple clipboard reader solution. Pity that the Festival voice synthesis demo site forbids the technique you used of accessing it directly via cgi, especially since the synthesis quality from there is so good (not surprisingly it is good though - they use a synthesised voice that would be over 100 MBytes to download and use locally!)

Rather than giving up on your great idea because of the restrictions on accessing the Festival facility, you could maybe use a different non-restricting site for the synthesis, or simply use espeak alone in conjunction with your idea, as I've described on your main thread concerning gaiksaurus/thesaurus/voice synthesis hotkey popup. I'd love to see your planned GUI come to fruition:

Posted: Wed 17 Aug 2011, 05:26 Post subject:
fokSyf Eye R version 1.0.0-1 downloadable on the web againSubject description: Not updated, but may still be useful

EDIT Oct 2013: I've now uploaded some of my old project work including wiak and fokSy Eye R to website: http://arkitektia.com. The downloads are currently found there under Products -> Software Designs (which is also accessible from right hand pane of the Arkitektia website).

Please uninstall any old version before installing the latest,
and then run foksy setup and reboot as usual.
[Remember the space between foksy and setup].
Please read installREADME.txt in detail before installing.

You can find the last versions of fokSyf Eye R for both Puppy Linux and the Ubuntu-family Linux distributions via:

I did compile speak from the speak package down to a <400kb pet. It needs an external audio player to play (aplay works) I even hacked a script that will play in real time by using stdout as the output and piping it through aplay....best of all there are no wierd dependencies

If anyone's interested, let me know._________________Check out my github repositories. I may eventually get around to updating my blogspot.

I did compile speak from the speak package down to a <400kb pet. It needs an external audio player to play (aplay works) I even hacked a script that will play in real time by using stdout as the output and piping it through aplay....best of all there are no wierd dependencies

If anyone's interested, let me know.

I've not used that one, but it if you upload it to the forum somewhere I would like to give it a run._________________github mcewanw

I've now uploaded some of my old project work including wiak and fokSy Eye R to website: http://arkitektia.heliohost.org. Will become http://arkitektia.com once DNS reconfiguration completed. The downloads are currently found there under Products -> Software Designs (which is also accessible from right hand pane of the Arkitektia website).

I'm currently back working with the latest version of Motion commandline Video Surveillance program http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=21518&search_id=1931578202 with a view to incorporating it in a revised version of foksy since all people (completly blind, visually impaired or whatever) could find automatic video motion detection useful... I actually planned to incorporate it in the original foksy but personal events halted that earlier work. On motion detection the program Motion can automatically start up other scripts or programs and also keep a video or image record of the motion. Should I get round to revising foksy I also hope to modify krecspk to use arecord and lame (and or ffmpeg) rather than sox/rec which it did in past. These commandline audio utilities are available by default in most recent puppies.

EDIT: The webserver is having a bit trouble with some MIME types - particularly tgz, so some of these not downloading even though there. That should be sorted out once final hosting website decided or maybe by adding some AddTypes to .htaccess file. The dotpets are all downloading fine though._________________github mcewanwLast edited by mcewanw on Thu 17 Oct 2013, 00:38; edited 1 time in total

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